The Awkward Age

“I’ve been about nothing but what among you people I’m always about. I’ve been seeing, feeling, thinking. That makes no show, of course I’m aware, for any one but myself, and it’s wholly my own affair. Except indeed,” he added, “so far as I’ve taken into my head to make, on it all, this special appeal. There are things that have come home to me.”

“Oh I see, I see,” Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness. “I’m to take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike you as the person best able to understand what they are.”

Mr. Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had not almost too much of a glitter: he kept the same position, his back against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed upright against the wall, they recognised in silence that they were trying each other. “You’re much the best of them. I’ve my ideas about you. You’ve great gifts.”

“Well then, we’re worthy of each other. When Greek meets Greek—!” and the young man laughed while, a little with the air of bracing himself, he folded his arms. “Here we are.”

His companion looked at him a moment longer, then, turning away, went slowly round the table. On the further side of it he stopped again and, after a minute, with a nervous movement, set a ball or two in motion. “It’s beautiful—but it’s terrible!” he finally murmured. He hadn’t his eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went on: “To see it and not to want to try to help—well, I can’t do that.” Vanderbank, still neither speaking nor moving, remained as if he might interrupt something of high importance, and his friend, passing along the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness, without the cue, the small click of the ivory. “How long—if you don’t mind my asking—have you known it?”

Even for this at first Vanderbank had no answer—none but to rise from his place, come down to the floor and, standing there, look at Mr. Longdon across the table. He was serious now, but without being solemn. “How can one tell? One can never be sure. A man may fancy, may wonder; but about a girl, a person so much younger than himself and so much more helpless, he feels a—what shall I call it?”

“A delicacy?” Mr. Longdon suggested. “It may be that; the name doesn’t matter; at all events he’s embarrassed. He wants not to be an ass on the one side and yet not some other kind of brute on the other.”

Mr. Longdon listened with consideration—with a beautiful little air indeed of being, in his all but finally benighted state, earnestly open to information on such points from a magnificent young man. “He doesn’t want, you mean, to be a coxcomb?—and he doesn’t want to be cruel?”

Vanderbank, visibly preoccupied, produced a faint kind smile. “Oh you KNOW!”

“I? I should know less than any one.” Mr. Longdon had turned away from the table on this, and the eyes of his companion, who after an instant had caught his meaning, watched him move along the room and approach another part of the divan. The consequence of the passage was that Vanderbank’s only rejoinder was presently to say: “I can’t tell you how long I’ve imagined—have asked myself. She’s so charming, so interesting, and I feel as if I had known her always. I’ve thought of one thing and another to do—and then, on purpose, haven’t thought at all. That has mostly seemed to me best.”

“Then I gather,” said Mr. Longdon, “that your interest in her—?”

“Hasn’t the same character as her interest in ME?” Vanderbank had taken him up responsively, but after speaking looked about for a match and lighted a new cigarette. “I’m sure you understand,” he broke out, “what an extreme effort it is to me to talk of such things!”

“Yes, yes. But it’s just effort only? It gives you no pleasure? I mean the fact of her condition,” Mr. Longdon explained.

Vanderbank had really to think a little. “However much it might give me I should probably not be a fellow to gush. I’m a self-conscious stick of a Briton.”

“But even a stick of a Briton—!” Mr. Longdon faltered and hovered. “I’ve gushed in short to YOU.”

“About Lady Julia?” the young man frankly asked. “Is gushing what you call what you’ve done?”

“Say then we’re sticks of Britons. You’re not in any degree at all in love?”

There fell between them, before Vanderbank replied, another pause, of which he took advantage to move once more round the table. Mr. Longdon meanwhile had mounted to the high bench and sat there as if the judge were now in his proper place. At last his companion spoke. “What you’re coming to is of course that you’ve conceived a desire.”

“That’s it—strange as it may seem. But believe me, it has not been precipitate. I’ve watched you both.”

“Oh I knew you were watching HER,” said Vanderbank.

“To such a tune that I’ve made up my mind. I want her so to marry—!” But on the odd little quaver of longing with which he brought it out the elder man fairly hung.

“Well?” said Vanderbank.

“Well, so that on the day she does she’ll come into the interest of a considerable sum of money—already very decently invested—that I’ve determined to settle on her.”

Vanderbank’s instant admiration flushed across the room. “How awfully jolly of you—how beautiful!”

“Oh there’s a way to show practically your appreciation of it.”

But Vanderbank, for enthusiasm, scarcely heard him. “I can’t tell you how admirable I think you.” Then eagerly, “Does Nanda know it?” he demanded.

Mr. Longdon, after a wait, spoke with comparative dryness. “My idea has been that for the present you alone shall.”

Vanderbank took it in. “No other man?”

His companion looked still graver. “I need scarcely say that I depend on you to keep the fact to yourself.”

“Absolutely then and utterly. But that won’t prevent what I think of it. Nothing for a long time has given me such joy.”

Shining and sincere, he had held for a minute Mr. Longdon’s eyes. “Then you do care for her?”

“Immensely. Never, I think, so much as now. That sounds of a grossness, doesn’t it?” the young man laughed. “But your announcement really lights up the mind.”

His friend for a moment almost glowed with his pleasure. “The sum I’ve fixed upon would be, I may mention, substantial, and I should of course be prepared with a clear statement—a very definite pledge—of my intentions.”

“So much the better! Only”—Vanderbank suddenly pulled himself up—“to get it she MUST marry?”

“It’s not in my interest to allow you to suppose she needn’t, and it’s only because of my intensely wanting her marriage that I’ve spoken to you.”

“And on the ground also with it”—Vanderbank so far concurred—“of your quite taking for granted my only having to put myself forward?”

If his friend seemed to cast about it proved but to be for the fullest expression. Nothing in fact could have been more charged than the quiet way in which he presently said: “My dear boy, I back you.”

Vanderbank clearly was touched by it. “How extraordinarily kind you are to me!” Mr. Longdon’s silence appeared to reply that he was willing to let it go for that, and the young man next went on: “What it comes to then—as you put it—is that it’s a way for me to add something handsome to my income.”

Mr. Longdon sat for a little with his eyes attached to the green field of the billiard-table, vivid in the spreading suspended lamplight. “I think I ought to tell you the figure I have in mind.”

Another person present might have felt rather taxed either to determine the degree of provocation represented by Vanderbank’s considerate smile, or to say if there was an appreciable interval before he rang out: “I think, you know, you oughtn’t to do anything of the sort. Let that alone, please. The great thing is the interest—the great thing is the wish you express. It represents a view of me, an attitude toward me—!” He pulled up, dropping his arms and turning away before the complete image.

“There’s nothing in those things that need overwhelm you. It would be odd if you hadn’t yourself, about your value and your future a feeling quite as lively as any feeling of mine. There IS mine at all events. I can’t help it. Accept it. Then of the other feeling—how SHE moves me—I won’t speak.”

“You sufficiently show it!”

Mr. Longdon continued to watch the bright circle on the table, lost in which a moment he let his friend’s answer pass. “I won’t begin to you on Nanda.”

“Don’t,” said Vanderbank. But in the pause that ensued each, in one way or another, might have been thinking of her for himself.

It was broken by Mr. Longdon’s presently going on: “Of course what it superficially has the air of is my offering to pay you for taking a certain step. It’s open to you to be grand and proud—to wrap yourself in your majesty and ask if I suppose you bribeable. I haven’t spoken without having thought of that.”

“Yes,” said Vanderbank all responsively, “but it isn’t as if you proposed to me, is it, anything dreadful? If one cares for a girl one’s deucedly glad she has money. The more of anything good she has the better. I may assure you,” he added with the brightness of his friendly intelligence and quite as if to show his companion the way to be least concerned—“I may assure you that once I were disposed to act on your suggestion I’d make short work of any vulgar interpretation of my motive. I should simply try to be as fine as yourself.” He smoked, he moved about, then came up in another place. “I dare say you know that dear old Mitchy, under whose blessed roof we’re plotting this midnight treason, would marry her like a shot and without a penny.”

“I think I know everything—I think I’ve thought of everything. Mr. Mitchett,” Mr. Longdon added, “is impossible.”

Vanderbank appeared for an instant to wonder. “Wholly then through HER attitude?”

“Altogether.”

Again he hesitated. “You’ve asked her?”